I was told there would be no math on this exam?

Due to a recent completely destabilizing wikipedia binge, my post today is going to focus on something very relevant to all of us: What we want to be when we grow up.

I don't mean what you wanted to be when you were ten, and had just watched Jurassic Park (paleontologist), or Speed (SWAT team member), or entering college (doctor...ugh.) I don't even want to include my undergrad career, because the idea of me ever enjoying writing enough to think that I could sustain my life on it full-time was just ridiculous. I don't even like writing enough to care if my sentences sound good. I don't think I've finished a story since I left undergrad. Good riddens to that shit, that shit stays a leisure habit.

Unless someone wants to pay me to write a book on the US Presidents...because then, ok, I'll do it. As long as I can dedicate at least half of it to James K. Polk and to Chester A. Arthur's muttonchops.

But I mostly want to list here a goal of what I want to be when I grow up, what I want to accomplish somehow and sometime during my life. I was going to put a Hemingway quote here, but one shouldn't always listen to Hemingway quotes. They lead to very strange things sometimes, though mostly always good things. But not today. Today is a non-Hemingway chill day. Instead, I'll leave you with another favorite, Willa Cather. "I shall not die of a cold; I shall die of having lived."

I also don't want to mention the word 'careers.' It's nice to have drive, but it's also nice to do something else with your life that isn't reading articles about diplomatic policies. I feel like since I could speak people have been asking me what my plans were in life. My fucking plan is to live, and live well. Now stop bothering me.

I want to look really badass in old-timey photos. 

Granted, I'm not exactly sure how the medium of photo will change in the next fifty years, but hopefully, in following with our explosion of technology, the photos during my twenties will look badass and cool. Pictures of people in the 90s right now don't look so suave, and more insane...

....so maybe I'll need to wait another fifty years for people to think I'm a badass. But I will wait. It's that important to me. Look at Willa Cather! Bonafide badass Willa Cather right there.

It's me, Willa Cather. I'm just chilling. Oh wait, what's that? I'm a baller? Tell me something I don't fucking know.

I want to have a good back.

Backs are under-appreciated  In Paris, I've been sleeping on the equivalent of bedrock, and now I can't even bend over without sounding like I survived the Oregon Trail. Then, I carry 20lbs of books to school everyday, up at least fifty separate flights of stairs because Paris is the least handicap accessible city the world has ever known. Plus, with all the reading I'm getting a quasi-quasimodo hump. I mean, if I'm going to take any lump, I'll take a literary one...but I need to start doing those old lady aerobics STAT.

Oh wait, chair aerobics doesn't include whiskey? Fuck it, then.

I'm going to start taking supplements or something just so I don't need to see a chiropractor. I don't even need to be super fit, I just want to be able to lift a bag of mulch without crying for the Good Lord to smite me. (Because hell yeah I'm going to be a gardening old lady. I'm already a gardening young lady, but with the age, I can get angrier about people and dogs urinating in my pelargonium.)

I want to climb a mountain. A really big mountain.

Ok. I know. I'm sort of afraid of heights, and I'm sort of not really in the most physically fit stage of my life and more in the 'let's eat as many crêpes as I can until my pants barely fit stage. And I'm ok with that. But I've always been weirdly obsessed with mountaineering, which I blame on a viewing of the 1996 IMAX movie on Everest. Every few years since then I've revisited this weird obsession, and it only becomes more and more fervent. COUPLE THAT with a perfectly timed reading of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (about the 1996 Everest Disaster), and now I'm like a nutjob wikipediaing crampons between class periods.

So I'm going to do it. I'm really sure how yet, or if I'll ever have the money because I'll be in loan debt the rest of my life. Or it might also be that I'm probably going to be living in third-world countries the majority of my life, and that's not exactly Nepal. So I'm not going to say which really tall mountain I'd like to climb one day, but I'll going to climb it.

But there's no fucking way I'm climbing Annapurna I.

This is Ed Viesturs. He's climbed all 8000m peaks. He also looks like a badass in old-timey photos.
He's also a silver fox without having silver hair, so I guess that just makes him a fox.

I want Tina Fey to acknowledge she stalked me while I lived in NYC.

Enough of you have told me, and I've finally relented. I don't know she did it, but Liz Lemon is based off me, albeit cooler and able to bang Dean Winters.

I want a piece of that beeper king, Lemon. 

I dressed as Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Halloween in 2009. Who suddenly had a  RBG obsession in 2010?!

Who worked in a Barnes and Noble in Union Square, especially on the floor with the bathroom? Unfortunately, me. WHO HAD AN EPISODE FOCUSING ON A UNION SQUARE BARNES AND NOBLE BATHROOM? Liz.

If I had to count the number of you to contact me Friday morning about a moment in "30 Rock" that reminded you of me, I'd be in the hundreds. I don't know what it is, but you all see it. And I'll I'm saying is that "30 Rock" was best when I happened to live in Manhattan.

I was being stalked. Stalked, and my life sold for television. Only for you, Tina. Only for you.


Ok, so this last one is a bit of a stretch. But some of the coincidences are creepy enough for me to mention them. Or maybe I'm just jealous of all the time with Dean Winters. Oz, man. You have to watch Oz.